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Google Earth on Linux

In this first set of shots you can see the installer at work. Hmm, looks a bit "loki" to me. I installed as my user into my home directory, so you won't have to trust google with your root access.

And here is our first glimpse as Google Earth is opened. Hmm, looks like the earth. You can turn and tilt and zoom in or out by means of these little controls up in the right hand corner. They work really well.

It has some nice features. Some are only available if you sign up for their premium service, but some are freely accessible.

If you look around in the menus you can find options to print, email, or playback your "tours" or locations. I'm not sure what one would do with that image overlay, but that placemark is kinda obvious.

Opps, not available for free. You'll see that quite a bit, but in the second shot you can see a "ruler" dialogue. I presume that is to measure distances. In the third screenshot is where I've spent most of my life. Yep, the U! The circled building is where I've spent most of that time.

In these shots is where I've spent the 2nd most of my life. Yep, my house. Only these shots aren't nearly as clear as the ones I took from school when I was playing on their XP computers last semester. Go figure. In addition, my house happens to be the one most out-of-focus in the whole neighborhood. That's a metaphor for my whole life right there.

Then you can take these little tours. Click on one of the supplied locations and the maps starts to zoom out, turn, and zoom back into the locale selected. Look how clear those jokers are.

Then they have this "building layer" which I reckon adds a level of clarity to the city scapes by providing images of the .. er, buildings. That's kinda cool, but it didn't help my house.

And the best feature of all is the directions maps. Just supply two addresses and google earth will conveniently map out those pesky directions for those out of town or cross country stalking jobs.

Well, that's about all I played with. I downloaded, I installed, I played.

More in Tux Machines

Jessie Release Date: 2015-04-25

We now have a target release date of Saturday the 25th of April. We
have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for
a release of Debian 8 - "Jessie".
The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical
pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up
technically unable to release that weekend.
Please keep in mind that we intend to have a quiet period from
Saturday the 18th of April. Bug fixes must be *in Jessie* before
then.

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

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